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Title: The Dying Poet
Author: Cale Young Rice [
More Titles by Rice]
Swing in thy splendour, O silent sun,
Drawing my heart with thee over the west!
Done is its day as thy day is done,
Fallen its quest!
Swoon into purple and rose, then die:
Tho' to arise again out of the dawn:
Die as I praise thee, ere thro' the Dark Lie
Of death I am drawn!
Sunk? art thou sunken? how great was life!
I like a child could cry for it again--
Cry for its beauty, pang, fleeting and strife,
Its women, its men!
For, how I drained it with love and delight!
Opened its heart with the magic of grief!
Reaped every season--its day and its night!
Loved every sheaf!
Aye, not a meadow my step has trod,
Never a flower swung sweet to my face,
Never a heart that was touched of God,
But taught me its grace.
Off from my lids then a moment yet,
Fingering Death, for again I must see
Lifted by memory all that I met
Under Time's lee.
There!... I'm a child again--fair, so fair!
Under the eyes does a marvel not burn?
Speak they not vision--and frenzy to dare,
That still in me yearn?...
Youth! my wild youth!--O, blood of my heart,
Still you can answer with swirling the thought!
Still like the mountain-born rapid can dart,
Joyous, distraught!...
Love, and her face again! there by the wood!--
Come, thou invisible Dark with thy mask!
Shall I not learn if she lives? and could
I more of thee ask?...
Turn me away from the ashen west,
Where love's sad planet unveils to the dusk.
Something is stealing like light from my breast--
Soul from its husk ...
Soft!... Where the dead feel the buried dead,
Where the high hermit-bell hourly tolls,
Bury me, near to the haunting tread
Of life that o'errolls.
[The end]
Cale Young Rice's poem: Dying Poet
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